Flowering Trees
This has been a splendid year for Milk Maids, those gently nodding, dainty white flowering annuals that spring up in late winter along the sides of roads and trails, signaling the end of winter. Soon we will be walking about our gardens, neighborhoods and woods, marveling at other small, spring-flowering plants, for example, the rampant, bold, blue for-get-me-knots, or the shy trillium, hiding in a shady place. To see these plants, we’re looking down, just beyond our shoes, just off the path.
But since January, I have been looking up, not down, at the show of blossoms on our flowering trees. The show always begins with Mimosa with its shocking yellow flowers billowing from trees, often several in a row, magnifying the spectacle. My flowering plum was right behind the Mimosa, filling in the side of our patio with a show of bright, variegated pink blossoms. Other flowering trees follow. By the end of March, I see in my daily travels about West Marin crap apples, tulip trees, apple, plum and pear trees, Ceanothus, to be followed soon by peaches, dogwood and others.
This is the best time of year to admire flowering trees of all kinds, to note their size, shape, and color, and assess whether they would be good candidates for our own gardens. Flowering trees are visible along the side of the road, in our neighbors’ gardens, in the nearby woods, in downtown Point Reyes at Station House Cafe. For shear spectacle, the mass of colorful blooms on a mature tree far out shines almost any flowering shrub or perennial and is well worth a place in most gardens. Fortunately, most flowering trees are not huge, and many have been bred to scale in domestic landscapes. I treasure my early flowering plum and, now in bud, a dwarf flowering peach at the end of a garden path. The pleasure they provide does not begin to be commensurate with the limited care they require–just judicious pruning and a fall mop-up after they lose their leaves.
One of my favorites is crab apple (Malus). Two Japanese flowering crabapples (Malus floribunda) are planted in the Inverness Library garden, one quite mature and the other about 8 years old. These reliable, gracious trees are not terribly showy, but each spring put forth their pink/red/white delicate flowers on slender stems, gently perfuming this small garden. Sunset’s Garden Book lists another 30 cultivars from 6 to 30 feet high. Not fussy about soil, requiring little pruning once established, relatively pest free, these flowering trees are a lovely addition to any garden and blend well with an understory of perennials, bulbs and annuals.
So, I encourage you to “lift your eyes” to the tree tops, as much to appreciate their annual outpouring of colorful blossoms, as to assess the suitability of any of our many blooming trees for your own garden. Make a note of your choices, and plan to plant your choices in the fall. It can be done right now, but trees planted in the fall always thrive best in our West Marin climate.